Echoes of the Well of Souls (22 page)

Lori gasped and felt the same panic rise in her that had already mastered Juan Campos; only Mavra's cool assurance and bemused expression kept her where she was.

Seemingly floating toward them was a huge apparition, a monstrous reptilian form perhaps three or four meters high, with a mean-looking head much like a tyrannosaurus Lori had seen in museum dinosaur exhibits. The head, however, was perched on an even wider body, with a burnt-orange underbelly fully exposed, all supported by two monstrous legs that vanished below the barrier wall. It seemed to have a tail as great as its body, and gigantic bony plates extended from just below the neck down to, and perhaps onto, the tail.

Its primary coloring was a passionate purple, broken with crimson spots so thick and regular, they seemed almost like polka dots.

The creature filled perhaps eighty percent of the width of the walkway, and it was coming straight for them, riding on a section that was moving.

Mavra turned to them and said, "Tell them do not move. Just wait and all will be safe."

Lori swallowed hard but said, "Come on, Campos! Be the macho man you always wanted to be! She says don't move and nobody will get hurt."

It was clear that Campos wanted to get up and run, but he was stopped both by the fact that his bound wrists made it hard to get back on his feet and by the sheer bravado of the two women. There was just no way Juan Campos could run away from anything in fear if two women stayed.

"Very well, but if I am to die, let me die with my hands free."

It seemed like a fair request. Lori allowed herself to take one eye off the still-approaching Leviathan and gesture to the bonds for approval. Mavra nodded, and Lori untied him.

He sat up, rubbing his wrists. "What sort of lunatic place is this, and how did we get here?" he asked, both eyes still on the approaching monster.

"I only promised you'd be free," Lori reminded him. "I didn't say where."

The creature was now very close, and it reached over and down with one of its fully formed hands at the end of long, spindly arms and struck the side of the barrier wall. The belt it was on stopped moving, leaving it about ten feet from them.

Lori gaped at the thing in wonder and saw now that it wore some kind of sash around its neck and upper torso with a complex symbol embossed on it by a method suggesting some advanced technology. Around its neck and over the sash hung a thick gold chain like some kind of giant necklace, and at the end of it hung what appeared to be a ruby-colored gemstone, hexagonal in shape.

The creature looked
them
over as well, and its head shook a bit from side to side and its eyes widened. The gem on the necklace seemed to light up and emitted a very soft whine, followed by a voice that Lori heard in English, Campos in Spanish, and Mavra in her ancient native tongue. It was a high-pitched, slightly nervous voice that didn't at all match the monstrous visage before them.

"Oh, my! Goodness gracious!" said the voice. "Savages!"

IN
AN INSTANT THAT SILLY, HIGH-PITCHED VOICE WITH A TRACE
of a lisp in it, the riotous colors, and the comment and tone made Lori think more of the Reluctant Dragon than of a terrible monster.

"I don't know what this place is coming to," the creature went on, speaking aloud mostly to itself. "Gentlemen, soldiers, and savages, all Type 41 Glathrielians, of all things, plus dumb animals, outright junk—what's next? This used to be such a
peaceful
posting!"

"Who are you?" Mavra Chang asked him in a normal, civil tone. Interestingly to Lori and Campos, the device on the necklace—obviously some sort of advanced translating computer—picked up her strange tongue and echoed it to them.

"I am Auchen Glough, Ambassador from Kwynn and the unfortunate current Duty Officer at South Zone. I assume you all fell in from this terrible planet called Dirt just like the others?"

"Close enough," Mavra responded. "There have been others?"

"Oh, my, yes! Not on my watch, I admit, but we've all seen the pictures and gotten the reports. First there was a party of three, then, a day or so later, two more, and now, after an
interminable
period when it's rained junk in here, the four of you. How many more?"

"No more, I shouldn't think," Mavra told him.

"Most unusual, most odd," muttered the ambassador. "We have had new arrivals here, but never,
never
from a planetbound group. Well, I suppose we should get this over with. If everyone will stand, I will take us back to the office for indoctrination and briefing."

"He can't stand," Lori said of Gus. "He's very weak and ill. He needs attention."

"Hmmm. Well, carry him over the junction points, and that will be enough for now. He's not likely to die in an hour or two, is he?"

"No. At least I don't
think
so. But if he doesn't get some kind of attention, he's going to die fairly soon."

"Then we'd best get on with it. Come."

Juan Campos felt some of his confidence coming back. "I am not following that
thing
until I find out where I am and what the hell this is all about!" he stated.

"If you follow me, I will tell you," the ambassador responded. "If you don't, you will get very hungry and very thirsty out here. We are headed for the only exit."

For now, at least, that seemed good enough.

With Gus in her arms, Lori stepped past the wall opening. Mavra was already there, and Campos followed last, wary but more worried about remaining alone than about going with what he still thought of as a potentially vicious monster.

The ambassador turned around, showing that the spiny plates did indeed extend down the tail and that the tail itself terminated in a very nasty-looking bony spike. He struck the side twice, and the moving walkway started, carrying them back down the chamber toward the unknown.

They were barely out of sight when Terry materialized on the concave floor.

She was a little confused and disoriented, having gone from a very unusual encounter with the Brazilian sergeant to a rain-soaked climb and then a fall through darkness, but she felt glad to be alive and looked around, amazed at the size and strangeness of the place.

I
don't know where this is, but it sure isn't Brazil,
she thought, gaping.
Sweet Jesus! I thought the People were weird enough, but this is getting weirder by the minute!

She got up, unarmed and naked as the day she was born with nothing that wasn't glued in or tattooed on, and looked around. She was wondering what to do next when she heard sounds of what might have been voices coming from very far away to her left. It wasn't much, and the sounds seemed to be diminishing with each passing moment, but, naked and unarmed or not, there wasn't much choice but to head off in that direction. She eyed the openings and the low barrier wall and scrambled up to the top of the nearest one.

She looked around, but the sounds were gone now, and there was an unnerving quiet and stillness about this massive place. There seemed nothing to do but head in the direction she'd thought the sounds had come from and hope for the best. She was certainly exposed as hell here.

She stared off into the distance and sighed. It was going to be a
long
walk.

No seats in the South Zone conference room seemed to be designed for humans, but there was plenty of floor space.

The Kwynn ambassador went to the front and pushed a concealed panel in the wall, and a small lectern and operating console rose from the floor until it was at the considerable height most useful to him.

"I realize that you all are very confused right now as to where you are and all the rest," he began hesitantly, trying to find the right words for what he considered the most primitive-looking bunch he'd ever known to come through. "I will try to make it as simple as I can. You are no longer on the planet on which you were born and raised. Somehow, by accident or design, you entered a device which transported you here. Never mind how—you could not possibly understand it even if you were the most advanced of races."

You don't understand it at all yourself, you old fraud,
Mavra thought, but kept silent.

"Seeing you, I believe it," Juan Campos responded. "But my only question is, How do I get back?"

"Um, well, you don't. It's strictly a one-way system now, although it once went in both directions. That was ages ago, beyond any living memories and all but the most basic of our records. I'm afraid you are here to stay."

"That is impossible! If one can get somewhere, one can get back!"

"Well, you are welcome to try, but I wouldn't suggest poking blindly even around here. You would be taken as a Glathrielian and could wind up being in a deadly situation. Glathriel doesn't really have any representation here except the Ambreza, and I doubt if you'd fare too well with them, either."

"What will you do with us?" Lori asked nervously.

"If you will kindly just allow me to continue, I think I can answer all your questions!" the ambassador snapped irritably. "It is difficult enough trying to simplify this when you don't have the background to understand it. Uh, you
do
know what planets are, don't you?"

"We are not as we appear," Mavra told him. "I think everyone will understand what you say. Do not simplify anything. If there's something we don't understand, we'll ask questions afterward."

"Oh, very well. You might understand what this place is a little better if you have some basic background, though. The universe as we know it is around twenty-four billion years old, give or take a few billion. On the vast number of worlds in the vast number of galaxies that it contains, life of all sorts evolved. It stands to reason that someone had to evolve up to a high standard first. There are many terms for them, but the one we use these days is simply the First Race. They were nothing like anything you know or even I know, and we have little direct information about them. What we
do
know is that they came up just like every other race does in the natural system and reached a level well beyond where any races are today. At least a billion or maybe more years ago they reached the top. They were everywhere, they'd explored everything that could be explored, and they were so advanced, they didn't need spaceships or much of anything to move from point to point. You arrived by one of their methods of travel. We call them hex gates, for obvious reasons. They did an awful lot of things based on sixes, and the hexagon was their sort of 'pet shape,' as it were. Finally they reached the point where they were like gods, permanently linked to their machines and able to have or do or experience almost anything they wanted just by, well, thinking of it."

Lori tried to imagine what they must have been like and failed. A race so advanced that they were magic. Whatever they wished, they could have. "Where are they now?" she asked. "Here?"

"No. And yes. And maybe. That is the impossible question, and it has a lot of answers, not all of them verifiable. You—all of us—would think that such an existence would be the ultimate one, and it probably was for quite a while. They banished fear and want and desire and even death. They probably had a lot of fun, maybe for millions of years, but after a while something we might not imagine happened."

"They started losing it?" Campos guessed. "No. They grew bored. Horribly, horribly bored. Have any of you ever played any gambling game? Any game of chance at all?"

They all nodded. "Of course," Campos responded. "What would happen if you discovered one day that you couldn't lose. That you could
never
lose?"

"I would settle a lot of old scores and wind up owning the world!" Campos replied.

But Lori said, "I think I see what you mean. It would get boring. It wouldn't be any fun anymore. If you can't lose, then winning is meaningless."

"Yes, precisely so. And that's what happened to them. Life lost all its meaning. There was nothing more to learn, nothing more to do that they hadn't all done a thousand times, no surprises, no reason for existence anymore."

"You mean they
killed
themselves out of boredom?" Lori was appalled.

"The ancient records imply that this is indeed what started happening; others went a bit mad, imagining a higher state beyond where they were and believing that they had a way to get there—which also, of course, meant death if they were wrong. It was the first crisis they faced in so long it was beyond their memory, so they got together and tried to figure out why being omnipotent was so empty. They couldn't believe that a permanent state of ultimate happiness was impossible, since their whole racial effort had been directed for so long at attaining just that, so they came up with the only other answer they could. They figured that they were somehow flawed. That they had evolved
incorrectly.
And since their experiments showed that they would wind up the same way if they started from scratch, they decided that their whole race had evolved wrongly, that it was impossible to reach that state as the First Race. It sounds crazy, I know, and perhaps it is, but that's the way they thought. Which of us could understand their thinking? And thus came about their Great Project."

"I do not think that I would get so bored," Campos commented. "Such power!"

"Perhaps. But we are not they. As I was saying, the Great Project. Even now I don't think we can even understand it. It is very unclear. It seems, however, that a giant experiment and computer—you know what a computer is? Good!—was built the size of a reasonable planet. On it, 1,560 laboratories, in fact, were built, each containing a unique ecosystem. They took beings from worlds where life had evolved, and they in many cases altered or speeded up the evolution of those races. In some cases, what had once been animals became a thinking and dominant race. In other cases, they made things up from whole cloth, often taking variations of ideas done by others. The idea was to create and test as large and varied a selection of potential master races starting from different worlds and backgrounds, to try and design the one system that would in fact produce the heaven they dreamed of. The laboratory areas, tightly controlled to make them simulate the theoretical planets and systems they'd invented, were divided into two segments. Since about half of all life that had evolved in the universe, including apparently them, was based on carbon, half the world was given over to carbon-based life-forms. The other half, just to be sure, was given over to non-carbon-based forms, like silicon, even pure energy and for forms with alternative atmospheres like ammonia and methane. A great barrier was placed between the two halves so that they could not interact with one another, and the non-carbon-based half had extra barriers guarding against one environment polluting another. The southern half was the carbon-based half. You are carbon-based, as am I, so we are in the south."

Lori was fascinated. "You mean
this
is the laboratory? And the experiment is still going on?"

"Well, this is the laboratory world, yes, but we
think
the experiment is long over with. In fact, it is somewhat humbling to realize that someone else got first crack. The
last
ones to have at it were the bottom of the barrel—still godlike creatures, nonetheless. We here now are, sad to say, among the last created. We call our current state the Last Races, for obvious reasons."

"Fifteen hundred and sixty different races?" Lori said as much as asked. "All here? Now? How big
is
this place, anyway?"

"Not huge, but big enough. Unfortunately, the translator has limits, one of which is measurement systems. From what I have learned from watching the recordings of prior entries here, I gather we are somewhat close to the same size as your home world."

"Huh? On a world the size of Earth, you've got 1,560 little worlds? It sounds like a collection of small domes."

"No, no, it's not like that. You will see."

"You were talking about those god creatures," Juan Campos put in. "You never said why they did this thing or what happened to them." He didn't like the idea of a whole race of godlike beings looking over his shoulder.